Weirdness is all around us.

Today I started to move out of my dorm room, I packed away everything into boxes and carried them to my car to drive them back to my house. The house I grew up in, the same house where most of the stuff came from in the first place. But, for some reason when the items from my dorm room do not seem to belong with the rest of my bedroom. It is as if because the objects from my dorm room were with me this year as I changed they changed with me, and now neither I nor them belong in the same room I had in high school. When I left for school there was only one item I did not put in a box to bring with the other stuff. It was a clock with a statue of Athena and her shield attached to it that I bought in Greece, and I carried it up to my room separate from everything else, and I made sure it had its own spot on my desk where I could see it everyday. I wanted to see it because that clock had all the memories of my trip to Greece with my friends wrapped into it. The feeling I had about that clock on the first day now seems to have been cast over a multitude of objects I brought back home from my dorm. Even though that clock left Greece, it has the power to take me back there and remember all the fun i had every time I see it. My clock is not just an object anymore it is a thing, “a vivid entity not entirely reducible to the context in which humans set it” (Bennett, pp. 5). My clock is special because it has its own life, and meaning, and without me it keeps ticking on, and it keeps holding those memories from Greece. My clock made me think about other things I was packing up that are vibrant.

Throughout this year I created a sort of memory wall in my dorm where I taped up football game tickets, concert wristbands, restaurant receipts, and anything else that signified a special memory. Taking those momentos off the wall while packing made me realize that because I attached those memories to the objects they too became special. So, I bought a book and I taped everything from the wall into it, and I took it home. That book is basically my entire first year of college, and even though I know I still have the memories and pictures from all the events, I feel like I need the memorabilia too. If these were taken away I would feel like I lost the memories. It took me a while to realize my wall is my “weird” because I had not realized something normal to me was at its core “weird”. Even if I had not kept any of my stuff for the wall it would have continued to act on the world without me, but instead I kept it and gave it my own sort of vibrance. I let the random momentos create reactions in me every time I look at them. When I look at my ticket from my first football game I feel how great it was to see my team win with my friends, and when I see the picture of my teacher from high school that recently passed away I feel that loss. It reminds me of the excerpt from Bennett where she says, “a vital materiality can never really be thrown away, for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity” (Bennett, pp. 6). I kept that stuff so I had a record of the date and what I did, but instead I got a wall full of vibrancy that let me relive memories whenever I wanted.

weirding4 This is a picture of my wall when I first started putting it up.

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Summary:

Encounters with "freakish" or "uncanny" people, places, animals, vegetables, minerals, practices, and events that exist on the peripheries, defy borders, and confound anticipations of where and how they belong.